


love is not all

by salvage



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: M/M, Mild D/s, moderate blasphemy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-13 23:33:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28536702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salvage/pseuds/salvage
Summary: It is, of course, entirely possible that the Captain is simply aware that the cold temperature of Jopson’s little berth makes it difficult for his hands to do the dexterous work of mending tears and reattaching buttons, and the dim light of his single tallow candle causes some strain on his eyes. But that his Captain would consider his personal comfort during the fulfillment of his duties is its own reward: one of the small pleasures Thomas hoards the way he used to collect buttons and aglets and other bright little findings as a child, a cupped palmful of private joys he tucks away in a most secret place.
Relationships: Francis Crozier/Thomas Jopson
Comments: 14
Kudos: 37





	love is not all

**Author's Note:**

> asmr jared harris calls you "good boy" (5 hours)
> 
> Title from Edna St. Vincent Millay. Thanks to Suzelle, who is here with me this time.

Jopson knows Captain Crozier well enough to know that his offer for Thomas to do his evening’s mending in the Great Cabin is entirely sincere; while other captains might not deign to allow their stewards to spend any more time in their presence than is absolutely necessary, Captain Crozier seems genuinely not to mind Thomas’s quiet company of an evening. Thomas doesn’t like to flatter himself so much as to imply that Captain Crozier _enjoys_ his company, and certainly not in the particular way he enjoys the Captain’s, but he likes to believe there is a sympathy between them that makes for a comfortable silence. It is, of course, entirely possible that the Captain is simply aware that the cold temperature of Jopson’s little berth makes it difficult for his hands to do the dexterous work of mending tears and reattaching buttons, and the dim light of his single tallow candle causes some strain on his eyes. But that his Captain would consider his personal comfort during the fulfillment of his duties is its own reward: one of the small pleasures Thomas hoards the way he used to collect buttons and aglets and other bright little findings as a child, a cupped palmful of private joys he tucks away in a most secret place.

So they sit in the Great Cabin together in quietude, the ship intermittently creaking and groaning about them as the ice tightens its grip around her thick strong beams, the ship’s bell distantly sounding each half-hour as it passes. Thomas is hunched within the little circle of white light created by the Preston Patent Illuminator that is fitted into the ceiling, his feet perhaps dangerously close to the stout stove that warms the room to the indulgent temperature of 41º or perhaps even 42º Fahrenheit. After having spent so many years first in the Antarctic and now here Thomas has developed a rather finely honed internal thermometer that can distinguish between single-degree changes in temperature in the realms adjacent to freezing, and he has found through long practice that 40º is the barrier below which his fingers refuse to engage in the detail work his occupation requires. 

The Captain is writing in the Ship’s Log and intermittently taking sips from the glass of whiskey Thomas poured for him two bells ago. When Thomas thinks he can get away with it he gazes at him: his serious profile, furrowed brow and set jaw; the messy spill of his half-undone necktie which Thomas aches to fix; his too-tight grip on his dip pen and the careful, deliberate way the Captain drags it across the fine paper of the log, frequently pausing to mumble a word under his breath before painstakingly tracing it out in ink. Even in the dim light Thomas can see that the Captain’s fingertips and the gutters of his nails are spotted black with ink and he is glad that the temperature in the Great Cabin is such that the Captain does not require his gloves, for Thomas would have a terrible time scrubbing the ink stains from them were they to become sullied. As it is, he knows that very soon he will be using the stiff bristles of the tiny horsehair nail brush in the Captain’s grooming kit to buff the dark stains out of his skin. 

Thomas is in many ways uniquely suited to his occupation and he has always taken great pride in his work, but in his service to Captain Crozier his innate professionalism has given way to a warmer and more personal pleasure at attending to his Captain’s every need. His anticipation of cleaning ink from the callus-rough skin of the Captain’s hands is not simply the diligent steward’s forward-looking consideration of his duties; instead, Thomas experiences a near-indecent thrill at the thought of holding the Captain’s hands in his own, feeling the relaxed curve of the Captain’s thick fingers clinging to Thomas’s, as though, just for a moment, the Captain were asking for a different sort of comfort from that which Thomas provided him, and Thomas were offering it freely. 

(There are many things Thomas would offer freely to the Captain outside the bounds of his responsibility. The balance of these do not bear thinking about.)

Although Thomas knows the carefully kept boundary of rank becomes somewhat malleable during these quiet evenings he spends with the Captain, there are still some lines that he will not cross; in deference to this, Thomas does not stretch his aching arms over his head to combat the painful tension in his neck and shoulders, but instead surreptitiously tips his head from one side to the other, feeling the vertebrae of his neck crack. Captain Crozier notices the movement and looks over at him with the amused little slant of his mouth that Thomas so rarely sees now. 

“You’ve been hunched over my coat for nearly three bells, now,” he says, voice rough with disuse and the coolness of the still air of the room. “You can take a lap about the cabin, I don’t mind.” The whiskey and the lateness of the hour slur his words into a soft brogue that Thomas treasures, associated as it is with these intimate moments they spend together. It feels more private even than the knowledge that beneath the pressed fabric of the Captain’s uniform shirt is a great soft expanse of paper-pale skin, marred with old scars and dotted with freckles across the broad curves of his shoulders and upper arms, furred with graying hair across his sternum and the little sloping curves of his pectorals; or that of the pink flush of his cock where it lies nestled at the junction of his thick thighs: for the hidden parts of Francis’s body could be revealed to any dutiful steward, but the softness and comfortable familiarity of his words are for Thomas, alone. 

“Do you require anything, sir?” Thomas asks. 

The Captain’s expressive eyebrows rise. “Only your comfort, Jopson,” he says, a little teasingly, but the words bring warmth to Thomas’s whole body regardless. 

“Sir,” Thomas manages. 

“All right, then, make me some tea.” 

Thomas smothers a smile. “I know you won’t drink it, sir,” he says, feeling bold. 

The Captain laughs, an abrupt sound that echoes between the walls of the Great Cabin and then, insidiously, seems to infuse the very air around them, making the space feel even closer and warmer than it already is. “If you’re mouthy enough for that, you should feel free to walk about,” he says, gesturing somewhat wildly with the hand that is holding his pen. A drop of ink has gathered precariously at the nib; Thomas notices but the Captain does not as it swells, full and black and gleaming in the dim light of the cabin, and then falls, spattering all over the Captain’s white shirtsleeve. 

This, now: this is Thomas’s realm. He jumps up, carefully setting the Captain’s coat over the back of the chair he had been using, and goes to the Captain’s side, sliding the slim length of the pen out of his grip and taking the back of his hand in the palm of Thomas’s own to examine the stain at the inside of his wrist. 

“This is what it takes, does it,” the Captain mumbles. 

“Off with this,” Thomas says, gently, plucking at the fabric.

When the Captain stands, almost entirely steadily, they are suddenly very close together. The scent of him washes over Thomas with the current of air stirred by the movement: sweat on hot skin, damp wool and whiskey, the metallic sharpness of leather polished by Thomas’s own hands. Thomas is of course familiar with the scent of the Captain’s body, both the sweet clean scent of the delicate skin of his throat freshly wiped of warm shaving-soap and the musky acidic scent of sweat trapped in the close hot crevasses of his body, under his arms and at the small of his back and the creases where his thighs meet his body, beneath the layers of flannel and cotton and box-cloth and wool of his uniform. Yet familiarity does not make it any less intoxicating to be close to him like this; on the contrary, like a man adrift drinking seawater to slake his thirst, the more of him Thomas takes in the more he seems to want. 

“I suppose you won’t be argued with,” the Captain says, tugging his hand from Thomas’s loose grasp to unbutton his uniform jacket.

“Not when I will be the one to launder this shirt, no,” Thomas confirms, knocking the Captain’s hands out of the way to briskly unbutton the jacket himself. 

“The mouth on you tonight,” the Captain murmurs, low and close and whiskey-sharp. Thomas very deliberately does not look up. “No one would ever know to look at you.” 

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Thomas says demurely, feeling as though he’s floating about two feet above and behind his own body watching his own steady hands work each gleaming golden jacket button out of its buttonhole. 

“You’ve been with me since thirty-nine,” the Captain continues in his quiet rasp, “I know you.” 

“And I, you, sir,” Thomas says. He slips the jacket off the Captain’s shoulders and folds it in half to drape it over the side of the desk, safely away from the pen and inkwell, and starts on the vest, peeling it, too, from the Captain’s pliant body so that he stands in his shirtsleeves before Thomas. With his necktie disarrayed and his shirt gaping open at the throat the Captain looks louche and dissolute, cheeks pink, mouth slack, eyes a little glazed. 

“Jopson.” To hear his name spoken in that low rough voice sends arousal skittering through Thomas’s body.

Thomas intently watches his own hands tug at the already loosened fabric of the Captain’s necktie until the knot dissolves and the creased ends of the fabric fall to either side of the Captain’s chest. He gently pulls at the necktie until it slips from around the Captain’s neck, disarraying the stiff stand of his shirt collar to expose further the stout column of his throat and the soft loose skin at the underside of his jaw whose texture and warmth are intimately familiar to Thomas’s careful hands. This shouldn’t be any different from the hundreds of other times Thomas has helped the Captain undress but the space between them feels like summer air just before a thunderstorm breaks the sky open, when the wind goes strange and the thick humid air seems to crackle with electricity. 

“Your shirt,” Thomas says, somewhat desperately, to the hollow at the base of the Captain’s throat, just barely visible above the collar of his flannel undershirt.

“Jopson,” the Captain says again, and he certainly can’t mean to skim the backs of his knuckles up Thomas’s side as he brings his hand to his chin to tip his face up. “You must tell me if I’ve read this wrong.” 

“No, sir,” Thomas breathes. He can feel his pulse fluttering frantically in his throat and the Captain must feel it, too, with the two fingers he has still gently resting against the soft underside of Thomas’s jaw, forcing Thomas to look at him.

“I hardly think it’s appropriate to use titles here,” the Captain says with that same amused tilt to his mouth. 

“Oh,” Thomas says very quietly as the enormity of what they might do settles over him.

Very slowly, slowly enough for Thomas to shake his head to dislodge the Captain’s hand as though shaking an errant lock of hair from his forehead, the Captain traces his fingertips up the stubble-rough line of Thomas’s jaw. Thomas thinks about the ink that stains them; it seems appropriate that the Captain’s delicate yet profound touch should leave a mark on Thomas’s own skin. The Captain’s thick fingers stroke over the neatly trimmed hair of his sideburn and then drift down the side of Thomas’s neck, over his shirt collar and neatly tied neckcloth, to alight gently on the slope of Thomas’s shoulder. He neither pushes Thomas away nor draws him forward: he simply allows Thomas to stand where he does, so that the choice, when Thomas makes it, to press up toward him is Thomas’s alone.

His Captain’s mouth is the warmest thing Thomas has ever tasted, the soft yielding press of his lips and the tempting wet heat of the inside of his mouth, the easy dart of his tongue against the plush curve of Thomas’s lower lip, as though he is, all at once, unreservedly Thomas’s, open and receptive to all Thomas has to give him. Thomas somehow did not anticipate the immediacy of the Captain’s reciprocal ardor and it sends a thrill through his belly to hold this secret knowledge alongside all the other secrets of the Captain’s Thomas has within him: the Captain wants him. The Captain has, perhaps, always wanted him, and in the same peculiar and forbidden manner in which Thomas has likewise wanted the Captain. 

With this knowledge, Thomas begins to touch the Captain’s body the way the Captain is touching him, gently but without hesitancy. The Captain slides his broad hand around the dip of Thomas’s waist to touch the small of his back, drawing him ever closer, and Thomas, in turn, moves his hands with an unhurried tenderness over the curve of one broad shoulder and the slight hollow above the line of a collarbone, the soft swell of one pectoral. This is not the perfunctory touch of a steward but the attentive and searching touch of a lover, and oh: how Thomas loves him. Thomas loves the solidity of the Captain’s thick chest and the surprising delicacy of the tender skin at the underside of his throat, the flutter of his short blond eyelashes as his eyes drift almost closed and the involuntary parting of his lips beneath Thomas’s, this and every other sweetly vulnerable expression of his Captain’s extraordinary capacity to love. For that is what it is, Thomas has no doubt: it is love, that emotion which bolsters Thomas and gives him such satisfaction to even mend a tear in the Captain’s overcoat, but that same emotion which drives the Captain to the despair that he seeks to drown each day. Thomas had resigned himself to rationing his love the way the engineers in the perpetually twilit engine room of _Terror_ have been rationing coal during their long encasement in the ice: just enough each day to keep the lead tanks of water that line the ship’s orlop from freezing, just enough each night to keep the men in their hammocks from mutinying or losing toes. He had never actually expected to be able to go for broke with it.

When Thomas first dips his tongue inside his Captain’s mouth the Captain lets out such a quiet but desperate little moan that Thomas immediately repeats the motion, exploring further the delicately soft interior of the Captain’s rough and stout body: the slick insides of his cheeks and the hard line of his teeth, the little gap at the forefront there, and then, deeper, the mobile muscle of his tongue, which also delves into Thomas’s mouth with such an eloquent suggestiveness as to make Thomas’s hot blood sing. Thomas wants, with a surprising urgency, for the Captain to explore all the hidden inner parts of him, his shameful desires and his obscure pleasures, his secret tendernesses and his invisible pains. He would open himself like a map unfurled across the dark mahogany of the command table, each peak and valley of the bare expanse of Thomas Jopson ready to be charted, to be claimed and named. 

They are already pressed close enough for Thomas to feel the Captain’s broad chest expand with each breath he takes against Thomas’s lips, so it’s just a small movement for Thomas to roll his hips against the Captain’s so that the Captain can feel the effect he has on Thomas’s eager body; indeed, even beneath the layers of their clothing Thomas can feel the Captain stirring in response, and the Captain’s hand slides down to the curve of Thomas’s ass to press them still closer. Thomas’s lips part in a silent plea that the Captain answers with his own open mouth, blessing Thomas with his fierceness and his tenderness in intoxicating turns, giving him everything he could ever desire.

“Sir,” Thomas murmurs against the Captain’s mouth. 

“Jopson,” the Captain replies, voice low and rough and wild; despite his earlier words, his roaming hands gripped Thomas’s hips convulsively at the title. But he draws back, as much as Thomas will let him with his arms thrown over his Captain’s shoulders, to look at his face. Whatever licentiousness Thomas had imagined before is nothing compared with what he sees now, his Captain’s kiss-pinked mouth and flushed cheeks, hooded eyes dark and wanting.

“Will you have me?” Thomas asks.

“Jesus,” the Captain says, heavy with his strongest brogue. “In any way you want.” 

“Not over the table, then, if you please,” Thomas says, just to see the Captain’s eyes crinkle with the sweet unfettered mirth he wears so infrequently now. 

“Were I a younger man,” the Captain teases with a lopsided smile. 

“And I a different one, entirely,” Thomas says tartly. 

The Captain’s expressive face turns wry and knowing. “I have half a mind to stop that mouth of yours,” he says. 

“You can try, sir.” 

“Jesus,” the Captain says again, almost reverently; it is blasphemy, certainly, but the quiet, almost reverent tone with which the Captain breathes the holy name feels more like worship than Thomas had ever seen from the Captain at any of Sir John’s mandatory Sunday sermons. They kiss again, hard, as though to devour one another, the Captain’s hands buried in Thomas’s hair, pulling sweetly. Under the gaze of the Preston Patent Illuminator fitted into the ceiling the Captain’s flush-pinked skin is highlighted in glowing white with the pale Arctic sunlight: this too is worship. 

The Captain’s little berth is dark and cool and smells familiarly of the Captain, of his shaving soap and of whiskey and wool and of the soft animal scent of sleep-sweat which clings to his skin each morning when Thomas comes to attend to him. It feels, paradoxically, larger than usual, the careful space Thomas has always kept from the Captain having been elided by their new intimacy. Thomas, always forward-thinking, breaks away from the Captain long enough to light not the fine wax candle that stands on the Captain’s desk but the half-burned tallow one that sits on the shelf above the bed. 

Perhaps it is perverse for Thomas to continue to privately refer to him as the Captain when they are pressed close in the Captain’s private quarters like this, the man’s hands clumsily working at unfastening the buttons of Thomas’s waistcoat, unpracticed as he is at the mirrored motion of unbuttoning someone else’s coat; hesitantly even in the confines of his own mind Thomas thinks, _Crozier_ , and then, _Francis_ , and the frisson of arousal that skitters through his body is so thrilling and forbidden that he thinks it again, _Francis_ , and then whispers the name aloud into the close humid space between their mouths: “Francis.” 

“Yes,” Francis says, so Thomas repeats it, and then once more, familiarizing himself with the taste of it in his mouth, and as together they shuck Thomas’s waistcoat and peel from his overwarm body his sweater and shirt and worn-soft flannel undershirt he murmurs it like a prayer, filling the air with the quiet hiss of his Captain’s name. 

To feel his Captain’s—to feel Francis’s—hands on Thomas’s bare skin is a revelation, and each further discovery of the secrets of Thomas’s body is profound in its own quiet way: the soft dense hair that furs Thomas’s chest between his pink nipples, which Francis scratches his fingertips through wonderingly, making Thomas writhe and arch beneath his touch; the paper-pale skin at the undersides of his arms, threaded through with the dark paths of veins like rivers traced on white maps; the slight curvature of his waist and his flat stomach, also downed with soft dark hair; the buttress of each rib against the taut skin of his torso and the jutting peaks of his hipbones. 

And the great soft expanse of the Captain’s tender body is likewise revealed when Thomas divests him of his remaining clothing, the familiar cartography of his chest and belly, dusted with graying blond curls of hair; his broad, faintly freckled shoulders and thick upper arms; strong thighs and slim bony ankles, and all this pale skin pitted and pocked intermittently with old scars. With the tender, searching lover’s touch Thomas is now permitted he explores this skin, Francis’s sensitive and newly bared body, the little tremors that wrack it and the waves of goosebumps that break over it, and when he slides to the floor between the Captain’s splayed knees it feels like genuflection. 

Thomas strokes the thick length of Francis’s arousal, hot skin silk-smooth under his hand, and when a drop of semiopaque liquid begins to pearl at its slit Thomas ducks down to lap it up, then fits his mouth around the bulbous blood-flushed cockhead. Francis’s body jolts and he groans softly, his fingers tightening in the bedclothes at the edge of the berth. Thomas takes him deeper, hand curled tight around what his mouth cannot reach, and swallows, feeling the soft hot inner planes of his mouth tighten around Francis’s cock. The taste of precome floods his palate, bitter and musky, salt-sharp like the sea. 

When Thomas pulls back, looking up the uneven terrain of Francis’s bare torso to see his expressive face near slack with pleasure, he feels a thin strand of saliva connecting his swollen lower lip with the drooling head of Francis’s cock and he darts his tongue out to break it. His mouth feels hot and abused to plumpness, thickly wet with precome and saliva, and Francis’s eyes track the motion of his tongue: as they watch each other Thomas licks his lips again, more slowly, putting on a show. 

“I won’t,” Francis begins, low and hoarse with arousal, “I won’t ask.” 

“Then let me offer,” Thomas says, the rasp of his own voice unfamiliar. 

The Captain’s bed is neither large nor soft, but it is marginally larger and softer than the small bunk set against the wall of Thomas’s steward’s quarters, in a way that feels utterly decadent when Thomas lies back against it. Or perhaps the decadence is in the knowledge that this is the place on the ship where Francis has spent so much time unconscious and unguarded, sleep-soft and sweetly vulnerable. Thomas gingerly rests his head on the pillow that he has seen the Captain’s slack face pressed against innumerable times, this uncomfortable little pillow that knows intimately the warm huffed breaths and dreaming closed-eye flutter of Francis’s unquiet sleep. The bedclothes are suffused with the warm animal scent of Francis’s body, too, so that when Francis hesitantly hefts himself over the welcoming splay of Thomas’s naked body Thomas feels entirely surrounded by him, his scent and his warmth and his charming reluctance even despite the way Thomas immediately draws him close. 

The tallow from the lit candle has already grown warm and liquid-soft, slickly coating the fingers Thomas dips into the little pool, and it eases the press of one slim finger and then a second into Thomas’s tight but willing body. With the closeness and weight of the Captain above him Thomas feels ravenous, reckless, with lust coursing through him like a fire. Francis curls a hand around Thomas’s cock and works it, steadily but a little too slowly to sate the wild want that burns within him, and as Thomas’s involuntary little moans become louder Francis fits his mouth over Thomas’s, lips to parted lips, swallowing each desperate noise he makes. 

When at last Thomas is ready for him he dips his fingers once more into the tallow, thinking, distantly, that he might never again smell the sharp, acrid scent of a tallow candle burning without thinking of this rapturous moment, the wide vee of his legs spread to accommodate the Captain’s body, the hot press of skin to skin. And then, with a domineering purpose that nearly draws Thomas to his climax right then, Francis drags him down the bed and hitches his legs up around his waist, pressing the thick head of his cock to Thomas’s hole. From the care which Francis seemed to be taking with Thomas he did not expect this and it brings a wonderful lightness to his head to be used thusly for the Captain’s pleasure; Thomas’s body goes lax. 

Francis breaches him, slowly but deliberately, filling him entire: the hot thick girth of him, the stretch and drag. It feels like all Thomas has ever wanted to give the Captain a home inside himself, to make space within his very body for him. Thomas’s hands scrabble weakly at Francis’s broad back and he nearly moans, softening the wild cry of pleasure into a ragged breath only with great effort. He feels possessed, wild, divorced entirely from the version of himself who has been a diligent, deferent steward for close to a decade. 

“You must quiet yourself, now,” Francis whispers against Thomas’s ear, hot and so close, as he pulls out until just the head of his cock is inside Thomas. Thomas nods vigorously and Francis pushes back in, the sweet press enough to draw another quickly smothered moan from Thomas’s throat. “Wouldn’t want to wake the whole ship, would you?” Thomas shakes his head; he is rewarded with another deep thrust. “Good boy,” the Captain says, and Thomas nearly does wake the whole ship at that, voice stopped only by the Captain’s hasty hand over his mouth.

Thomas trembles and whimpers as the Captain fucks him steadily, hand still over his mouth, thick cock relentlessly opening him. He wants to howl. He wants to keen. He clutches at the Captain’s body, weak hands and tense thighs, sweat slicking the skin where they touch and where they don’t, pooling in the little hollows behind Thomas’s knees and in the folds of his stomach, plastering his hair to his forehead. His mouth feels very hot and wet under the broad press of the Captain’s hand. He can neither look at the Captain nor look away, caught between the blank darkness of his closed eyes and Francis’s keen, piercing gaze.

“You are such a good boy,” the Captain repeats as Thomas sobs silently. “My good boy.” 

His climax, when it reaches Thomas, crests and breaks over him like a wave, washing him clean of all but the deepest and profoundest gratitude for what he has been given: this work, which has brought him to such a man as Francis; this devotion, which is so sweetly reciprocated; this body, which fits so perfectly with his Captain’s. This is benediction. Francis climaxes, too, just following Thomas, hips stuttering up and up against the soft flesh of Thomas’s ass to spend deep inside of him. 

In the haze that follows Thomas is aware of the separation of their bodies, though he clings to the broad span of Francis’s shoulders and noses unselfconsciously at the warm, sweat-damp hollow of his throat. Francis detaches him only briefly and then immediately returns, his rough sailor’s hands so gentle with Thomas’s pleasure-weak body. 

“Sir,” Thomas mumbles. 

“For all you’ve done for me,” Francis says, cleaning his spend from the intimate creases of Thomas’s body with a damp handkerchief, “let me do this for you.” 

“I’ll have to wash that handkerchief, too,” Thomas slurs, and he feels the low rumble of Francis’s laugh where his face is pressed to Francis’s chest. 

“Tomorrow,” Francis says. “And you’re staying here tonight. Unless,” he demurs, possessed again of that sweet hesitancy from earlier, as though, even after all this, he would not take the liberty of choice from Thomas. 

“Please,” Thomas says, nuzzling closer, and Francis folds him more comfortably in his arms.

**Author's Note:**

> Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink  
> Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;   
> Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink   
> And rise and sink and rise and sink again;   
> Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,   
> Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;   
> Yet many a man is making friends with death   
> Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.   
> It well may be that in a difficult hour,   
> Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,   
> Or nagged by want past resolution's power,   
> I might be driven to sell your love for peace,   
> Or trade the memory of this night for food.   
> It well may be. I do not think I would. 
> 
> Edna St. Vincent Millay


End file.
